36 delegates from the eight Australian Universities to have adopted InPlace in the last 20 months attended the Inaugural Australian User Group Meeting hosted by the Australian Catholic University on 18-19 April 2012.
All participants declared the meeting a great success and resolved to reconvene in October 2012. Deakin University has offered to host the second conference and it was agreed to invite international users to the second event.
The first session began with an update from each university on the progress of the rollout of InPlace, which ranged from fully implemented by some of the more established clients to just started. Much interest centred on the different approaches taken to deploying the system at each university, and the benefits that the more mature users were seeing.
This was a great start towards a key stated aim of the User Group was the learning and sharing of information from each university’s experiences with implementing InPlace.
The QuantumIT team then presented a series of new Product Features categorised by recently completed, work in progress and roadmap. Highlights of the numerous features and enhancements presented included;
- InSight – the Survey and Assessment Tool
- Progress Graphs for Requests and Allocation
- Self Selectable placements and the ability to define pre-qualification rules in student selection
- Matching of Students to agencies for the sending of requests to agencies with a student associated
- Student User Interface redesign and Mobile website
- New data migration tool
- The Turbo allocation algorithm which was demonstrated comparing 400 students to 700 placements using three weighted rules including a map based distance comparison – best match results returned in less than 10 seconds.
Following sessions addressed specific software matters, including how to best integrate and interface InPlace with state agencies and Health Provider clinical placement systems.
Recent changes at QuantumIT including the new InPlace helpdesk resource and software, new software deployment model, release notes structure and the social media innovations were outlined.
Unanimous agreement that the time was very well spent. Some comments: “What a wonderful couple of days!” , “Great people!” and “Lots of learnings!”.
Special thanks to Marlene Pitman from Flinders University, Joanne Cameron from Australian Catholic University and Carole Green from Queensland University of Technology for their stellar efforts in organising and hosting the event.
